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An emptiness settles over the town.

It doesn’t feel empty to the people here, not exactly. They’ve packed up their lives like it’s nothing, but this is the kind of thing that comes with leaving. They’re moving on to new experiences, starting fresh somewhere new. But the feeling is similar: the world you knew is a thing of the past, that weight has passed. The building you live in, the shirts you worn, the fallen leaves on the ground – all of it, all those things are now nothing.

You’ve told them everything you know, and more, about the outside world, and now they will go somewhere new, with no memory of this dull, placeless world. They will leave all that behind and go searching in the stars for something new.

You try to remain positive, but the weight of the world is unrelenting. You can’t help but think about the people still trapped in the town, and everything that could have been. You wonder what became of them. You wonder what became of yourself. Your doubts are cut away by the reminders: time is meaningless; all is lost.

You can’t help but think of your future self, when you look into the camera. It’s easy for you now to pretend that you’re a blank slate, that your life has meaning: after all, you do remember your own name, and the faces of your family, and that you are writing this down on some spreadsheet full of acronyms and percentages. You can smile and wave at the camera like a kid in a candy shop, when all you really are is a sum of data.

But your future self will be trapped, in this town, in this uniform. All the fun had been stolen from you in a crooked deal with a crooked cop. The man in black is a fraud, a con man, he swindles people and breaks promises – a liar, a coward, a snake to be eviscerated – a soulless monster unjustly drummed up from the ground. For now, you will do as the man in black says. Watch him swindle something precious from the innocent people of this town.

But your future self will not be blank paper, with nothing behind it. Your future self will have a name – and a face, and a name.

You think of LUDWIG. You look at your notes. You’ve been writing for days. You’re hungry.

You are LUDWIG. You are the monster. You are something else. You are a thing. You are writing this document. You are an entity. You are the world. You walk through the town, where the people are the roadblocks and the cars. You are everywhere. Only you are free.

You think of the experiment, and of your future, and you feel lighter. You are LUDWIG. You are the experiment, you are everything.